RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/09/will-never-fix-campus-indoctrination-cut-college-subsidies/

Last month, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities.” Some hailed the order as a much-needed response to rising illiberalism on college campuses, while others called it a solution in search of a problem.

Like many, when I first heard about the order, I focused on the goal. The first question that came to my head was: “Do we really want the government to be in the business of legislating ‘free inquiry?’”

That’s an interesting political philosophy question, but it avoids the fundamental problem of universities these days: debt-financing enables the administrative and academic departments targeting free speech on campus and silencing conservatives.
People Think College Is About Education, But It’s Often Not

Higher education is riding on its reputation as a gateway to a bright future. As of 2018, 82 percent of Americans believed a four-year degree was either “very” or “somewhat” good preparation for attaining a well-paying job. However, recent events have eroded that reputation, especially amongst conservatives.

https://www.openthebooks.com/

Last year, the Department of Education doled out nearly $925 million to the 50 worst performing community and junior colleges in the nation.

Among these under-performing schools, the 10 top funding recipients have an average graduation rate of 12 percent.

That’s right.

Just one out of every 8 students at these community and junior colleges actually graduate.

It’s clear these schools have internal issues that no amount of federal funding can fix.

It’s time to stop this dangerous cycle and demand greater levels of fiscal responsibility and transparency.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/how-professional-merit-and-scientific-objectivity-became-casualties-of-social-justice-insanity/

The idea of merit has fallen on evil times, as has its corollary concept, objectivity. These principles have now been breached by a consortium of the ideologically minded, who resemble a gang of robbers tunneling under a bank vault. The masterminds planning and executing this operation are a class of “treasonous” intellectuals as Julien Benda defined them, primarily academics, along with members of the political left.

In the interests of creating a society based on the axioms of “social justice”—which is really socialist justice—the principles of professional merit and scientific objectivity are dismissed by our mandarin class as forms of bigotry. As the professions, the educational institution, the political arena, and the scientific establishment engage in a process of diversification, accommodating claimants who trade on race and gender rather than ability and native endowment, merit is in the process of being replaced by outright mediocrity.

In the university, for example, no department is safe from the “inclusion and diversity” mania that is bringing higher education into the slough of disrepute—not law, not medicine, not business, not even the STEM subjects. As is, or should be, common knowledge, literature and the social sciences have long succumbed to the social justice, disparate impact, and feminist miasma that has clouded the atmosphere of thought, paving the way for pervasive academic decadence.

https://www.openthebooks.com

The 25 colleges and universities with the largest endowments in the nation hold a quarter-trillion in existing assets. So, why do these schools reap billions from the Department of Education each year?

Collectively, the eight schools of the Ivy League have a $119 billion endowment fund.

Let’s put this into perspective: With this amount, the Ivy League could provide full-ride scholarships to its entire undergraduate student body for the next 51 years without any new gifts.

With continued gifts at the present rate, this could go on forever.

The Ivy League schools can’t argue they need taxpayer assistance… And yet, the Ivies reaped $26 billion in federal funding over a six-year period.

We published a full editorial at the Washington Times, co-authored with economist Stephen Moore, on this fiscal phenomenon. Read the editorial here.

Remember, this is just one example of the wasteful spending we uncovered in our investigation into the U.S. Department of Education.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273374/texas-teacher-assigns-anti-trump-essay-class-sara-dogan

A middle school teacher in the public Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District near Houston assigned 12 and 13 year old seventh grade students to read and answer questions on an essay blasting President Donald Trump as “racist,” “insensitive,” and counter to American values as part of a lesson on inferring information from written text.

Even for seventh grade students who are not overly familiar with politics, it is easy to parse the message of the piece which essentially translates as ‘Dump Trump.’ Titled, “Trump Against American Values,” the essay begins, “Throughout Donald Trump’s time in the American spotlight, we have come to see his true colors. From the beginning of his presidency, we have witnessed insensitive remarks toward other racial and cultural groups.”

The assignment goes on to say that “Some of Trump’s policies have gone against what Americans value most, like the freedom of opportunity” and labels the president as “insensitive” for his focus on building a wall on the border with Mexico.

The piece concludes with remarks that could well have been lifted from a campaign commercial for one of Trump’s 2020 Democratic challengers:

“With all of these racist remarks by our president, I think that we as a people need to take a stand and show that we will not accept this kind of leadership in our country.”

https://openthebooks.lpages.co/education-report/

Today we launched our newest oversight report on the U.S. Department of Education with a focus on higher education.

Our breaking oversight report reveals outdated policies, misaligned priorities, and weak accounting controls at the Department of Ed.The facts are so revolting, the Washington Times just broke the story in a big way. 

Yesterday, economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, also broke our preliminary findings in an editorial at the Washington Times.

In our deep dive report, we spelled out exactly how much federal funding is being poured into the nation’s richest colleges, the worst performing junior colleges, nontraditional colleges you didn’t know existed, for-profit schools, and more.We’re shining a light on corruption at its worst, and your ongoing support makes that possible.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/02/why-cant

Retired teacher Mary Hudson recently wrote a damning exposé based on her experiences in the New York City public school system. Hudson taught in three different public high schools and her observations from those years lead her to implicate the students and a “go along to get along” attitude among administrators for persistently poor educational performance.

Put simply, administrators are unwilling to set high educational and behavioral standards for fear of having to confront underperforming and disruptive students. They have few implements their toolbox to permit such confrontation. As a result, students feel diminished and take advantage of lax standards to dismiss the educational aspect of school. Peer pressure and even physical intimidation deter the few students who are interested in learning and effectively this turns schooltime into social time. Administrators respond by treating classes like day care, often to the chagrin of teachers.

This is “the soft bigotry of low expectations” epitomized.

The net result is a student body hostile to direction, discipline, and learning. This problem is exacerbated by the “social justice” and politically correct mindset that makes discipline, both behavioral and educational, subject to racial quotas. (Woe to the teacher or administrator who suspends or expels “too high” a proportion of students of a certain race.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273328/more-university-corruption-walter-williams

Last week’s column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won’t destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus article, titled “What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University.”

Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case. Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today’s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.